Access user data from your backend

Hanko User Data Retrieval Guide:About Hanko:Hanko is a modern open source authentication solution and the fastest way you integrate passkeys, 2FA, SSO, and more—with full control over your data. Move between self-hosted and Hanko Cloud anytime. No lock-in. Just Auth how it should be: secure, user friendly, and fully yours.What This Guide Covers: This guide demonstrates how to retrieve user data from Hanko in backend environments, including validating sessions, extracting information from JWTs, and using the Admin API.Key Technologies:

JWT (JSON Web Tokens)
Hanko Admin API

Prerequisites:

Active Hanko project with configured API URL
Basic understanding of JavaScript/TypeScript
Admin API access (for Admin API features - Pro/Enterprise plans only)

Tasks You’ll Complete:

Validate user sessions and extract JWT claims
Fetch comprehensive user data using the Hanko Admin API
Implement proper authentication checks in your application

The /sessions/validate endpoint allows you to extract user claims from the JWT token.

// Checks the validity of the current session and returns the user claims
const validateSession = async (sessionToken) => {
    const apiUrl = process.env.HANKO_API;
    const options = {
        method: "POST",
        headers: {
            "Content-Type": "application/json",
        },
        body: JSON.stringify({
            session_token: sessionToken
        }),
    };

    const response = await fetch(`${apiUrl}/sessions/validate`, options);

    return response.json();
};

const sessionToken = ""; // Get the session token, this depends on your framework you use.
const sessionStatus = await validateSession(sessionToken);
console.log("user data:", sessionStatus);
// Example output:
// {
//   is_valid: true,
//   claims: {
//     subject: "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000",
//     session_id: "789abc",
//     expiration: "2025-04-25T12:00:00Z",
//     email: { address: "user@example.com", is_primary: true, is_verified: true },
//     custom_field: "value"
//   }
// }

You can refer to the User Metadata guide for details on managing user metadata included in the JWT payload. For information on customizing session tokens with metadata, see the Session Token Customization guide.

Get user data using the Hanko Admin API

The Hanko Admin API provides comprehensive access to user status, management capabilities, metrics, and more. This example focuses on retrieving data for a specific user. To fetch data for a specific user, make a request to the /users/{id} endpoint of the Hanko Admin API, where id is the user ID obtained from the JWT.

The Hanko Admin API is available in Hanko Pro and Enterprise plans. Check out our pricing page for more information.You also need an API key secret to access the Hanko Admin API which can be generated under the Settings > API Keys section of your project.

const getUserData = async () => {
    const adminAPI = process.env.ADMIN_API;
    const adminSecret = process.env.ADMIN_SECRET;
    const options = {
        method: "GET",
        headers: {
            Authorization: `Bearer ${adminSecret}`,
        },
    };

    const response = await fetch(`${adminAPI}/users/${userID}`, options);

    return response.json();
};

const userData = await getUserData();
console.log("user data:", userData);

Getting started

Guides

Using the Hanko API

Integrations

Resources

FAQ & support

Access user data from your backend

Get user data using the Hanko Admin API

​Get user data from the session cookie

​Get user data using the Hanko Admin API

Get user data from the session cookie

Get user data using the Hanko Admin API